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Title: What Democracy Looks Like.
Creator: Dennis, Taegan, Moore, Lisa, Rhoads, Cristyna
Abstract/Description: Diverse community members in Tallahassee come together to participate in various forms of activism surrounding the “March For Our Lives” movement and show us what democracy looks like. (13 minutes)
Date Issued: 2018-07-12
Identifier: FSU_libsubv1_scholarship_submission_1531422436_dfbb314b
Format: Video file

Title: Rape in Contemporary American Literature: Writing Women as Rapeable.
Creator: Young, Tiffany Ann, Moore, Dennis, Ward, Candace, Edwards, Leigh, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In the 1970's, with the second-wave feminist movement, sexual violence became a forefront topic in feminist studies and it continues to trouble the boundaries between disciplinary studies. When I refer to rape, I consider it a criminal act, a violent sexual invasion on the body in connection to hegemonic discourse, resulting in sexual victimization. Looking at the cultural representation of rape in literature allows us to understand the cultural fears and fascinations with rape while...
Show moreIn the 1970's, with the second-wave feminist movement, sexual violence became a forefront topic in feminist studies and it continues to trouble the boundaries between disciplinary studies. When I refer to rape, I consider it a criminal act, a violent sexual invasion on the body in connection to hegemonic discourse, resulting in sexual victimization. Looking at the cultural representation of rape in literature allows us to understand the cultural fears and fascinations with rape while respecting the victims of assault. Looking at novels beginning in the late 1930's and continuing to the present, I hope to deconstruct the hegemonic discourse surrounding rape. Through the corporeal acts of sexual violence, we can understand ways the writer socially constructs sexuality, race, and gender and ways fictional assault both is scripted by and scripts cultural
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0868
Format: Thesis

Title: Rewriting the Mother Figure in Selected Novels by Contemporary African American Women.
Creator: Thaxton-Simmons, Andreia, Moore, Dennis, Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: ABSTRACT In this project, I theorize the implications of maternal loss in novels by contemporary African American female novelists. Maternal loss in this project is used to describe a separation of mother and child, specifically daughter, due to a disconnection in communication, death or dislocation. I argue that maternal loss symbolizes loss figuratively and literally. It symbolizes the loss of a distant African past, the loss of freedom, a loss of historical records and a literal/literary...
Show moreABSTRACT In this project, I theorize the implications of maternal loss in novels by contemporary African American female novelists. Maternal loss in this project is used to describe a separation of mother and child, specifically daughter, due to a disconnection in communication, death or dislocation. I argue that maternal loss symbolizes loss figuratively and literally. It symbolizes the loss of a distant African past, the loss of freedom, a loss of historical records and a literal/literary loss of black mothers. I note that the experience of maternal loss in the novels causes protagonists to search for Mother. The character must seek a connection with an enabling, maternal figure. Black motherhood has historically been laden with numerous challenges. Discussed by black feminist scholars such as bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Davis, these challenges include mothers being disconnected from their children during and after the slave trade, poverty, various forms of abuse and efforts to overcome negative images set forth by dominant society. Contemporary African American female authors examine these challenges in the context of maternal loss, re-memory and third space. They look at the past to see how it impacts the present. However, they also face challenges in writing the maternal stories of the past. The primary challenge they face is trying to write in a void. They attempt to write/rewrite a history that has limited written records and the records that do exist are often thwarted or told from a biased point of view. Thus, black motherhood becomes a site for re-memory. This project examines the use of maternal loss, re-memory and third space to reconstruct black motherhood in Toni Morrison's Sula, Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café, and Tina McElroy Ansa's Ugly Ways. It focuses on the use of history and its merge with an idealized space for maternal figures. The maternal figures contemporary black female novelists reconstruct can be linked with a distant African past and vestiges of the rural south. Yet, they are empowered and positioned to reject the historical mandates that have been placed upon them by patriarchal society and male dominance. Through the use of maternal loss, re-memory and third space, contemporary black female novelists create maternal figures that are able to mother on their own terms and in their own way.
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Date Issued: 2012
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-5183
Format: Thesis

Title: "Monsters More than Men": Interrogating the Captivity Narrative in a Transatlantic Context.
Creator: Taylor, Jennifer, Moore, Dennis, Vitkus, Daniel, Shinn, Christopher, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The third quiet revolution to which my title refers is occurring now. In both literature and history, important changes are taking place, with more and more scholars seriously questioning the methods of each discipline, the validity ofthe disciplinary boundaries institutionalized by our universities, the texts (in a broad as well as narrow sense) typically studied, and the ideologies embedded within our various scholarly enterprises. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word The quotation from...
Show moreThe third quiet revolution to which my title refers is occurring now. In both literature and history, important changes are taking place, with more and more scholars seriously questioning the methods of each discipline, the validity ofthe disciplinary boundaries institutionalized by our universities, the texts (in a broad as well as narrow sense) typically studied, and the ideologies embedded within our various scholarly enterprises. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word The quotation from Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word still rings true after 17 years, as the revolution in academia she describes continues to take place. Scholars are redrawing or simply omitting boundaries, including those of nations and cultures, as well as of forms of literature. For this reason, it is time to consider how, for too long, scholars have remained quarantined within the era in which they have developed their expertise, and that narrowness has hurt literary studies. The following thesis includes a discussion of this very topic, and then sets out to demonstrate by discussing the difficult topic of origins. Where does a literary form or genre 'originate?' Is it an author, a place, an era? I contend that it is all three and neither, and no era may lay claim to any distinct form. Since this is true, compartmentalizing English departments into specialties of eras and forms with such little communication does not allow for the more complex readings necessary for understanding. This complexity of origins is demonstrated thereafter with a discussion of captivity narratives, as they have lately been theorized to be the origins of the English novel. By complicating the history of the captivity narratives as a form, and by tracking some of the influences on the form as a whole, this thesis shows that the captivity narrative as a form also lacks a true origin. Why do we begin to separate history into eras, literature into forms, and therefore, compartmentalize ourselves into titles such as "Early Americanist?" Why do so few Early Americanists attend Renaissance conferences, for example? Reaching as far out and beyond as an MA thesis will allow, my project interrogates the captivity narrative in a transatlantic context by mapping out influences and political agendas, and by breaking the divide between Early America and the Renaissance. An example of surprising information I have found by do so is that the narratives written in the English language have been influenced by Arabic culture as early as Medieval times.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1663
Format: Thesis

Title: Female Body and Revolution: Creole Writing of Caribbean and North American Literature in the Eighteenth Century.
Creator: Phillips, Lindsey Nicole, Ward, Candace, Moore, Dennis, Rai, Amit, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century, Britain's transatlantic colonies resisted political, social, and religious control in order to establish a government controlled by the people, which allowed freedom and equality for all citizens. However, this ideal form of freedom did not extend to women and slaves within the newly formed American colonies. Until the middle of the twentieth century, critics often have overlooked, or ignored, the erasure of female history and the crucial...
Show moreIn the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century, Britain's transatlantic colonies resisted political, social, and religious control in order to establish a government controlled by the people, which allowed freedom and equality for all citizens. However, this ideal form of freedom did not extend to women and slaves within the newly formed American colonies. Until the middle of the twentieth century, critics often have overlooked, or ignored, the erasure of female history and the crucial position women, regardless of race, occupy within the colonial and republican societies. This project aims to (re)examine race and gender within the Caribbean and early American context, reinstating the role and struggle of women. Aphra Behn, in Oroonoko, and William Earle, in Obi, reveal the potential threat and rebellious spirit of female slaves within the Caribbean. In The Coquette, Hannah Foster questions the freedom and equality of women in the republican society, and she draws a comparison between the republican marriage contract and the institution of slavery. Leonora Sansay's Secret History places two American women in the Caribbean to illustrate the importance of female community and collectivity in removing women from patriarchal control. Using the Haitian Revolution as her backdrop, Sansay uses the slaves' success to provide an example for women to follow. Americans, as former inhabitants of England, become Creoles in the American colonies, undergoing a process of creolization that resembles that experienced by Caribbean colonists. However, as the early United States formed its own independent nation, its citizens adopted British colonial ideology and, at the same time, distanced themselves from the perceived limitations of Creole subjectivity. This project attempts to illustrate this contradiction between the ideals of freedom and equality and the reality of the colonial and republican societies in the transatlantic colonies and to illustrate the influence and interconnection between Europe, America, and the Caribbean.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0984
Format: Thesis

Title: Visions for A New World: A Journey Through Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms.
Creator: Lee, Kendra Gayle, Moore, Dennis, Edwards, Leigh, Montgomery, Maxine, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms forge a new borderland in literature, a fluid world where Native American traditions and Native American spirituality resonate, dynamically responding to the world in which the characters live. The borderland of these novels calls into question white culture's perception of nature, society, economics and history. Silko's and Hogan's works clearly express the necessity to blur...
Show moreLeslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms forge a new borderland in literature, a fluid world where Native American traditions and Native American spirituality resonate, dynamically responding to the world in which the characters live. The borderland of these novels calls into question white culture's perception of nature, society, economics and history. Silko's and Hogan's works clearly express the necessity to blur boundaries, which are diametrically opposed to the American Indian view of the Earth as a living entity with a spirit, and the necessity to create a pull toward a new society. Yet this society is neither an assimilation to white culture nor a return to traditional tribalism. It is a vision for a new world, undefinable by the structures that bind Anglo-American ideas and philosophy. This vision commands dissolution of the current economic and class system, sensitivity to and responsibility for the environment, and a respect for basic human rights. The vision encompasses an awareness of individual spirituality, a connection to community and an acknowledgement of the divinity of all life. Ecofeminist philosophy, the pull toward a union with the earth and equality for all living beings, unifies these novels and forms a basis for analyzing them in a literary and social context.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3204
Format: Thesis

Title: Crumbling Masculinities: Adaptations, Filtration, and the Crisis of Masculinity.
Creator: Champion, Jared, Moore, Dennis, Edwards, Leigh, Fenstermaker, John, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My thesis project, titled Crumbling Masculinities: Adaptations, Filtration, and the Crisis of Masculinity, addresses the construction of masculinity through what I label "filtration." By building on the work of gender scholars like Michael Kimmel, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, this thesis seeks to show that society teaches individuals to play gender roles by filtering either feminine or masculine traits accordingly. For example: in general, men are no less emotional than women, but society...
Show moreMy thesis project, titled Crumbling Masculinities: Adaptations, Filtration, and the Crisis of Masculinity, addresses the construction of masculinity through what I label "filtration." By building on the work of gender scholars like Michael Kimmel, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, this thesis seeks to show that society teaches individuals to play gender roles by filtering either feminine or masculine traits accordingly. For example: in general, men are no less emotional than women, but society teaches that masculinity links emotion with weakness, so masculine figures filter emotion to create masculinity. The thesis opens with a discussion of David Mamet's original stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross and his subsequent adaptation of the piece to film. This chapter establishes that gender in religious representations, particularly traditional modes of masculinity, is in a period of flux following postmodernity. The following chapter uses a discussion of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of the nonfiction work to film in Adaptation to show that masculinity is constantly creating itself through the process of filtration. The final chapter in the thesis uses the discussion of filtration to show that socially constructed gender and biological sex are becoming disconnected, yet the masculine/feminine binary still exists and privileges masculinity. In conclusion, Crumbling Masculinities argues that gender is currently in a period of transition, and as such, the thesis attempts through an analysis of the adaptation process to explain the potential of this crisis to shape gender.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3926
Format: Thesis

Title: One Plus One Equals Three.
Creator: Steinmetz, Kristi Marie, Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila, McRorie, Sally, Fenstermaker, John, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation is a creative non-fiction manuscript following in the combined literary traditions of the American Captivity Narrative (e.g., Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Hélène Cixous's écriture feminine, and Gloria Anzaldúa's "autobiographical consciousness" (Irene Lara "Daughter of Coatlicue" 54). The project speaks to and for the common yet controversial reality in our society of the choices – for both natural mother and natural father – surrounding pregnancy...
Show moreThis dissertation is a creative non-fiction manuscript following in the combined literary traditions of the American Captivity Narrative (e.g., Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Hélène Cixous's écriture feminine, and Gloria Anzaldúa's "autobiographical consciousness" (Irene Lara "Daughter of Coatlicue" 54). The project speaks to and for the common yet controversial reality in our society of the choices – for both natural mother and natural father – surrounding pregnancy. The project also provides an account of contemporary America's response to single-parenting between the years 2002 and 2006. Although the memoir is a personal investigation of pregnancy, abandonment-grief, birth, and mothering, this work is an act of transformation and healing that extends outward into the culture in that it is a textual moment of learning and knowing. The memoir is a process of interaction Anzaldúa would refer to as conocimiento: of writing self beyond self (Lara 44-45).
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0376
Format: Thesis

Title: Drilling for Oil and Gas in and Near Florida: Lease Sale 181 and Beyond.
Creator: Dempsey, Angela Cote, Moore, Dennis D., Arline, Terrell K., Donoghue, Joseph F., Program in American and Florida Studies, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis examines the geology, history, law, policy and environmental effects of drilling for oil and gas in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. Annually, the Gulf supplies approximately 25% of the United States' oil and gas supplies. The U.S. Department of the Interior has divided the Gulf into three Planning Areas, the Eastern, Central, and Western. Historically, the Central and Western have had significantly more exploration and production activity than the Eastern due to lesser resources and...
Show moreThis thesis examines the geology, history, law, policy and environmental effects of drilling for oil and gas in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. Annually, the Gulf supplies approximately 25% of the United States' oil and gas supplies. The U.S. Department of the Interior has divided the Gulf into three Planning Areas, the Eastern, Central, and Western. Historically, the Central and Western have had significantly more exploration and production activity than the Eastern due to lesser resources and Florida law and policy. Florida bases its restrictive policy toward drilling off its shores on the state's fragile ecology, economic dependence on tourism and military operations conducted in the Eastern Planning Area (EPA). Additionally, there are significantly fewer estimated petroleum reserves in the EPA. Currently, there is some exploration in the EPA on 1.5 million acres adjacent to the Central Planning Area and 100 miles from Florida's coast. Florida's government helped reduce the size of the area, known as the Lease Sale 181 area by 75% and continues to fight to maintain no leasing within 100 miles of Florida's unique shores. Environmentalists have recognized the decrease in size of Lease Sale 181 area is one of the most significant environmental victories by a state administration. Florida should continue to aggressively protect its fragile coastline, groundwater and biologic resources in all three branches of government.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0766
Format: Thesis

Title: White-Washing History: Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s the Clansman as Novel and Play.
Creator: Rouse, Kristen L., Bickley, Bruce, Moore, Dennis, Winegardner, Mark, Green, Elna, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel, The Clansman, was an instant bestseller and its subsequent theater version toured the nation for five years. The novel and play later became the basis for the full-length motion picture and box-office smash, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's story, despite its gross historical inaccuracies, served as a popular history of Reconstruction, echoing contemporary academic prejudices and reinforcing the codes of white masculinity and racial supremacy that had come...
Show moreThomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel, The Clansman, was an instant bestseller and its subsequent theater version toured the nation for five years. The novel and play later became the basis for the full-length motion picture and box-office smash, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's story, despite its gross historical inaccuracies, served as a popular history of Reconstruction, echoing contemporary academic prejudices and reinforcing the codes of white masculinity and racial supremacy that had come under question at the turn of the twentieth century. This process of re-visioning history to validate popular prejudices is key to understanding the creation and success of Dixon's most famous—and notorious—contribution to American culture.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0305
Format: Thesis

Title: Sacred Unions: Catharine Sedgwick, Maria Edgeworth, and Domestic-Political Fiction.
Creator: Elmore, Jenifer Lynn, Moore, Dennis, Hadden, Sally, Walker, Eric, Burke, Helen, Haywood, Chanta, Stern, Julia, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Since the 1980s, literary scholars in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. have recovered the contributions of the nineteenth-century American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and her older Anglo-Irish contemporary Maria Edgeworth, establishing both as groundbreaking contributors to their respective national literatures. This dissertation casts new light on both authors by examining their private writings to reconstruct their actual historical relationship to one another and by interpreting their...
Show moreSince the 1980s, literary scholars in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. have recovered the contributions of the nineteenth-century American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and her older Anglo-Irish contemporary Maria Edgeworth, establishing both as groundbreaking contributors to their respective national literatures. This dissertation casts new light on both authors by examining their private writings to reconstruct their actual historical relationship to one another and by interpreting their published works in a transatlantic and post-colonial context. Reading their works side by side reveals that both authors were preoccupied with modeling Union—the harmonious union of qualities within the individual, of husbands and wives, of disparate groups within larger societies, and, most importantly, of member states within larger political nations, such as Edgeworth's United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Sedgwick's young United States of America. Though Sedgwick and Edgeworth lived an ocean apart and never met in person, their literary celebrity and shared literary project connected them. Throughout her career, Sedgwick's readers and critics compared her style, her subject matter, her literary and social mission, and indeed the totality of her literary persona to that of Edgeworth. The dedication of Sedgwick's first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), is an encomium to Edgeworth that establishes how much the novice American admired this mature writer who had already achieved enormous transatlantic literary stature. Edgeworth's response to that dedication initiated an occasional correspondence between the two women, and Sedgwick continued to inscribe her fiction with intertextual references to Edgeworth. Important points of intersection between Sedgwick's and Edgeworth's oeuvres include their literary treatments of women and their writings about women writers, their pioneering literary regionalism, their fictional representations of socioeconomic and ethnic others, and their use of allegory to infuse domestic fictions with national political significance. Both writers employ various narrative strategies in presenting the many aspects of their social and political philosophies to the public in a fictional and often coded form that this dissertation theorizes as the sub-genre of domestic-political fiction. This sub-genre was the means through which both authors modeled their ideals of perfect Union.
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Date Issued: 2002
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0568
Format: Thesis

Title: The Education of a 'Learned Wife': Discovering the Reading Practices of Southern Women during the Rise of the United States.
Creator: Cohen, Kerry M., Hadden, Sally E., Moore, Dennis, Green, Elna, Department of History, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "The Education of a 'Learned Wife': Discovering the Reading Practices of Southern Women during the Rise of the United States" will explore the inner thoughts of women living in the South between 1790 and 1860 to better understand how women continued to educate themselves through literature. Many women did not keep diaries and through the ages the personal writings of those who did have been lost to historians forever. Those diaries, however, that survived through publication or archives allow...
Show more"The Education of a 'Learned Wife': Discovering the Reading Practices of Southern Women during the Rise of the United States" will explore the inner thoughts of women living in the South between 1790 and 1860 to better understand how women continued to educate themselves through literature. Many women did not keep diaries and through the ages the personal writings of those who did have been lost to historians forever. Those diaries, however, that survived through publication or archives allow the life and experiences of Southern women as a whole to continue to speak and allow historians to research their reading habits and lives. The words of these women uncovered or rediscovered will direct the course of this project, allowing an exploration and analysis to piece together the lasting influences and enrichment of the mind from their reading practices.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3571
Format: Thesis

Title: A Cross-Section of Research and Reflection in Composition and Rhetoric.
Creator: Brown, Meredith Kate, Bishop, Wendy, Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The four essays in this exam portfolio are representations of my research interests and expertise in Composition and Rhetoric following the exam portfolio structure. The first essay is a revision of two essays I wrote during fall 2001 about Robert Zoellner's 1969 talk-write theory. I argue that Zoellner's ideas lay the foundation for social constructionist theory and have similarities with process pedagogy. Many of Zoellner's critics dismissed talk-write because of its behaviorist base, but I...
Show moreThe four essays in this exam portfolio are representations of my research interests and expertise in Composition and Rhetoric following the exam portfolio structure. The first essay is a revision of two essays I wrote during fall 2001 about Robert Zoellner's 1969 talk-write theory. I argue that Zoellner's ideas lay the foundation for social constructionist theory and have similarities with process pedagogy. Many of Zoellner's critics dismissed talk-write because of its behaviorist base, but I believe that the problems with writing pedagogy Zoellner brought to the forefront are the same problems writing teachers and theorists struggle with today. The second essay is a bibliographic essay in which I review the recent literature on online writing labs (OWLs). I use the bibliographic essay to inform the third essay, which is an original essay written for this portfolio that offers tips for writing center directors who are interested in setting up an OWL, but are apprehensive. I point out the benefits of reaching students online, as well as the challenges of OWL set-up, maintenance, theory, and practice. The fourth essay is my teaching philosophy. I explain that my teaching philosophy is continually evolving, and with each semester, new experiences influence my growth and teaching identity.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2967
Format: Thesis

Title: The Arabian Nights in British Romantic Children's Literature.
Creator: Coppinger, Kristyn Nicole, Walker, Eric, Moore, Dennis, O’Rourke, James, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Children's literature emerged as a new genre in the eighteenth century. In order to break away from the unrealistic and non-educational fiction available and attractive to children, writers began to create rational tales. John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and, later, Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) both heavily influenced the rational tale trend. Writers composed rational stories of children learning moral lessons without the imaginative elements associated with the...
Show moreChildren's literature emerged as a new genre in the eighteenth century. In order to break away from the unrealistic and non-educational fiction available and attractive to children, writers began to create rational tales. John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and, later, Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) both heavily influenced the rational tale trend. Writers composed rational stories of children learning moral lessons without the imaginative elements associated with the potentially detrimental genre of fairy tales. The children's book market was popular with the middle class who had money and a desire to acquire status symbols, even for their children. Antoine Galland's publication of Les Mille et Une Nuits in 1704 introduced Europe to the Arabian Nights. English versions of the Nights circulated immediately, primarily in chapbook form; however, self-proclaimed translations appeared later in the century, such as Richard Johnson's The Oriental Moralist (1790). Alan Richardson in his book, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832, outlines the methods used by rational tale writers to incorporate fantastic elements into their stories. Writers exploited the appeal of imaginative literature by utilizing the plot structures, settings, and themes to enhance their moral fiction. As the rational tale trend took control of the book market, the Nights became a text to use for didactic means. Writers revised and rewrote elements of the Nights tales to be appropriate for a young audience. The rational tales produced in the eighteenth century reflect the consumer presence of the middle class. The Nights tales, tales of merchants and traders, offered an ideal foundation for middle class ideals, such as industry, virtue, and social mobility. In this thesis, I demonstrate the presence of the Arabian Nights in the children's literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition, I examine the link between middle class values and the Nights in my selected readings. My primary sources for information on children's literature of the eighteenth century include Alan Richardson, M.O. Grenby's article "Tame Fairies Make Good Teachers: The Popularity of Early British Fairy Tales," and Geoffrey Summerfield's book Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century. The children's texts I discuss in this thesis include "Princess Hebe" (1749) from Sarah Fielding's The Governess; The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor (1805); a self-proclaimed translation by Richard Johnson, The Oriental Moralist (1790); "Traveller's Wonders" and "The Travelled Ant" (1794-8) from John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Evenings at Home; "Murad the Unlucky" (1804) from Maria Edgeworth's Popular Tales; The History of Abou Casem (1825); "The Sea-Voyage" and "The Young Mahometan" (1809) from Charles and Mary Lamb's Mrs. Leicester's School.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3390
Format: Thesis

Title: African Spirituality in the Novels of Tina McElroy Ansa.
Creator: Surrency, Jeneen K. (Jeneen Kimberly), Montgomery, Maxine, Jones, Maxine, Johnson, David, Moore, Dennis, Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: A canonical story is present in Baby of the Family (1989), Ugly Ways (1993), The Hand I Fan With (1996), You Know Better (2002), and Taking After Mudear (2007)--the five novels of contemporary author Tina McElroy Ansa. That narrative involves the African-American woman's quest for belonging in an increasingly complex twentieth and twenty-first century South. Additionally, that quest tends to include a coalescence of the sacred and secular, an aspect of African spirituality. The central aim of...
Show moreA canonical story is present in Baby of the Family (1989), Ugly Ways (1993), The Hand I Fan With (1996), You Know Better (2002), and Taking After Mudear (2007)--the five novels of contemporary author Tina McElroy Ansa. That narrative involves the African-American woman's quest for belonging in an increasingly complex twentieth and twenty-first century South. Additionally, that quest tends to include a coalescence of the sacred and secular, an aspect of African spirituality. The central aim of this study is to argue the importance of Ansa's novels being included in the conversation on the relation between current African-American women's fiction and African spirituality and in the canon of African-American literature. The rationale for this argument is Ansa is one of a few African-American authors, and authors in general, who are able to claim possession of a canonical narrative throughout their body of works. Furthermore, this study will assert that many of Ansa's themes/depictions compare to those of the African-American women writers who are presently embraced in the discussion of the juxtaposition between the spirit and material worlds in African-American women's fiction. This study is in conversation with Cheryl Wall and other theorists and researchers who offer an embracement of African spirituality as a survival mechanism for African-American women in patriarchal society. This study also addresses W. E.B. Dubois' idea of double consciousness and Homi Bhabha's third space. Finally, this study aims to contribute to that conversation by finding that Ansa's texts demand a rethinking of black female identity and the public and private spaces in which black women find themselves.
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-5214
Format: Thesis

Title: Not "Who Is on the Lord's Side?," but "Whose Side Is the Lord on?": Contesting Claims and Divine Inscrutability in Samuel 16:5-14.
Creator: Simpson, Timothy F. (Timothy Frederick), Goff, Matthew, Moore, Dennis, Kelley, Nicole, Levenson, David, Department of Religion, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Second Samuel 16:5-14 is an important text for defining the character of both King David and Yahweh, the God of Israel. In this scene, the points of view of the various speakers battle for control of the narrative, attempting in turn to align their perspective with some aspect of what has been revealed earlier about Yahweh in the larger biblical story. Shimei, relative of the dead King Saul, paints David as a murderer and under a divine curse. Shimei presents himself as God's instrument of...
Show moreSecond Samuel 16:5-14 is an important text for defining the character of both King David and Yahweh, the God of Israel. In this scene, the points of view of the various speakers battle for control of the narrative, attempting in turn to align their perspective with some aspect of what has been revealed earlier about Yahweh in the larger biblical story. Shimei, relative of the dead King Saul, paints David as a murderer and under a divine curse. Shimei presents himself as God's instrument of truth and vengeance. Abishai, David's nephew, first paints Shimei as a seditionist worthy of death, and then David as a kind of moral weakling who has lost his previous vigor and resolve. Abishai presents himself as the upholder of God's Torah, the traditional family and the values that David himself used to espouse. David, when it comes his turn to speak, cuts a middle path between Shimei and Abishai, agreeing and disagreeing with both in turn. He then makes a startling theological declaration about his relationship to Yahweh that has often been taken to be a sign of faith, but which can more easily be read as a sign of his own hubris, which in turn fundamentally shapes the way in which the reader comes to think about Yahweh.
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-5185
Format: Thesis

Title: Epidemic of the Mind: Insanity and Early American Literature 1789-1804.
Creator: Price, Matthew L., Moore, Dennis, Gray, Edward, Silva, Cristobal, Montgomery, Maxine, Ward, Candace, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation examines the ways in which the science of insanity informs the creation of the American citizen during the years of the early Republic. By utilizing the medical texts of "America's first psychiatrist" Benjamin Rush, as a way of interpreting early American literature, I discern that the uses of insanity factor into some of the key discourses about the creation and function of citizenship in the decades just proceeding the American Revolution. Recent scholarly trends in early...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the ways in which the science of insanity informs the creation of the American citizen during the years of the early Republic. By utilizing the medical texts of "America's first psychiatrist" Benjamin Rush, as a way of interpreting early American literature, I discern that the uses of insanity factor into some of the key discourses about the creation and function of citizenship in the decades just proceeding the American Revolution. Recent scholarly trends in early American literature have started to understand how disease, especially small-pox and yellow fever, uncover the strategies at work in transforming individuals into national citizens. In the late-eighteenth century, insanity is conceived as a disease capable of spreading throughout a geographic space. By examining the public's reaction to this "epidemic of the mind," I reveal that the appearance of insanity in texts by Crèvecoeur, William Hill Brown, Charles Brockden Brown, and Leonora Sansay gesture towards the precarious position of former loyalists, women, and slaves during the late eighteenth century. In each chapter I argue that the language of madness and the discourse on citizenship mirror each other, with both offering a bleak assessment of post-Revolution America.
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Date Issued: 2012
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-5119
Format: Thesis

Title: A Room of Her Own: Identity and the Politics of Space in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction.
Creator: Bryant, Ceron L., Montgomery, Maxine, Erndl, Kathleen, Johnson, David, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Sherley Anne Williams, and Gayle Jones are contemporary African American women novelists who are keenly aware of and genuinely concerned with Black women and their ability to define themselves. The authors know that Black women live very complex lives and that Black women have been historically removed from that process. Subsequently, their texts enlighten readers about Black women's desire for their own space, a place of refuge fled to by Black women in order...
Show moreToni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Sherley Anne Williams, and Gayle Jones are contemporary African American women novelists who are keenly aware of and genuinely concerned with Black women and their ability to define themselves. The authors know that Black women live very complex lives and that Black women have been historically removed from that process. Subsequently, their texts enlighten readers about Black women's desire for their own space, a place of refuge fled to by Black women in order to combat the social politics that lead to oppression. Their texts depict and speak to a relatively broad range of Black women's forms of objectification. Sula, Praisesong for the Widow, Dessa Rose, and Corregidora share similar concerns: How does the Black woman respond to an oppressive and patriarchal society? What anti-patriarchal practices are used to combat this oppression? What are some of the specific agents used by Black women implemented to maintain a defined Space? Is obvious accessibility the only reason folklore and vernacular speech are used as a means of self-definition? While many critics and scholars have identified the importance of Black women escaping oppression and objectification, what remains is a more in-depth analysis of the methods involved as the Black women work to define themselves in their own sovereign Space.
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Date Issued: 2012
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4746
Format: Thesis

Title: Ceci N'Est Pas une Baleine: Surrealist Images in Moby-Dick.
Creator: Glover, Albert, Kirby, David, Fernandez, Roberto, McElrath, Joseph, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation analyzes the relationship between the surrealist painters of the twentieth century and the verbal images of Herman Melville in his masterpiece Moby-Dick. The work examines Melville's lifelong affinity for the visual arts, his strange visual images, and the relationship he has to the surrealists of the subsequent century.
Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4237
Format: Thesis

Title: Unholy Matrimony: Marriage and Identity in Twentieth Century African-American Women's Fiction.
Creator: McCray, April Letitia, Montgomery, Maxine, Jones, Maxine, Moore, Dennis, Saladin-Adams, Linda, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This project seeks to interrogate the ways in which race, class, and gender expectations work in concert to seduce the black heroine into believing that marriage will somehow deliver her from the trappings of her current social standing. This deliverance of Black female characters is often perceived as financial and may involve elevation to a higher social class, like West's Cleo Judson. However, for most black women in 20th century literature, the "happily ever after" is often unattainable...
Show moreThis project seeks to interrogate the ways in which race, class, and gender expectations work in concert to seduce the black heroine into believing that marriage will somehow deliver her from the trappings of her current social standing. This deliverance of Black female characters is often perceived as financial and may involve elevation to a higher social class, like West's Cleo Judson. However, for most black women in 20th century literature, the "happily ever after" is often unattainable because of the crushing effects of racism, sexism, and the enduring legacy of slavery. Nonetheless, African-American women novelists continue to portray the marriage plot as the ideal because Black women feel obligated to enjoy the legal and political rights of marriage that their ancestors were refused. For Black women in the early 20th century, marriage is portrayed as the Holy Grail that the previous generation could not have legally attained. However, over time, marriage morphs into a wholly undesirable state, in mind, body, and spirit. Claudia Tate has done extensive analysis regarding the representations of marriage and the black family in nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Her book, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century and Sybille Kamme-Erkel's 1988 dissertation "Happily Ever After? Marriage and Its Rejection in Afro-American Novels" are the only full-length studies that explore the treatment of marriage in African American fiction (duCille 149). While Tate's work is significant as it situates a group of black female writers and their eleven novels of "genteel domestic feminism" within the domestic sphere, the most recent novel she analyzes was written in 1903 (Tate 4). This study seeks to begin to fill in the gap of novels written by and about Black women about the institution of marriage in the 20th century, as well as the significant changes the black heroine has endured for the sake of fulfilling societal norms. Currently, no other scholar has done a sustained analysis of the marriage plot in 20th Century Black women's novels. Some literary scholars such as Henry Louis Gates and Michael Awkward recognize Zora Neale Hurston as the literary foremother of the Black female novelist tradition. However, my study suggests that Nella Larsen, who began publishing a full decade before Hurston, initiated a strong tradition of Black female novelists. Nella Larsen's novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) provide the social and political framework for other Black women novelists to emerge. Ann duCille published The Coupling Convention in 1993, and in it she provides a thorough rendering of the racial and gender politics that inform the marriage plot for Black female heroines. However, her study is divided into two major parts: the first period addresses the birth of literary scholarship amongst Black women at the turn of the century; the second focuses on a "second flowering of novels by African-American women" to begin with Jessie Fauset and end with Zora Neale Hurston (duCille 10). My project takes duCille's work a step further and identifies a more contemporary "third flowering" that spans the 20th Century and begins with Nella Larsen and ends with Gloria Naylor. The Black women novelists who follow in Larsen's footsteps each revise her version of the marriage plot in some significant way. Dorothy West's The Living is Easy (1948), Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985) each modify the framework of the marriage plot that Larsen devised in Quicksand. This project not only shows how and why the marriage plot has evolved over roughly a one hundred year span, but it also points to the conditions which allowed for such an occurrence. Because of social and historical events such as both World Wars, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Feminist Movement, the meaning of marriage as a cultural principle drastically changed for all Americans, but especially for Black families. Historically, writings by and about Black women have been largely excluded from the literary canon. More specifically, writings about Black marriage in literature are even more rare. This study provides a social and historical analysis of the marriage plot as a convention in novels written by Black women in the 20th Century. This study will answer and provide insight into the following questions: Why do some black women writers present marriage not as a "hopeful beginning," but as an "emphatic dead end"?, as Joseph Boone suggests. How has the portrayal of marriage evolved throughout the 20th century? How do black women novelists represent the domestic sphere? In what ways is marriage a form of entrapment and/or enslavement for black women? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being married for black women?
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2595
Format: Thesis

Title: Selling the Shadow, Supporting the Substance: Representing the Black Body in Abolitionist Literature and Culture, 1830-1865.
Creator: McWilliam, Fiona M., Moore, Dennis, Frank, Andrew, Ikard, David, Montgomery, Maxine, Roberts, Diane K., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation analyzes antislavery literature between the years 1830 and 1865. Antislavery activists often cast themselves as messengers, responsible for showing the truth about slavery to the American public. The changing print culture allowed abolitionists to spread their message in a way that was previously not possible, in the form of pamphlets, newspapers, novels, poetry, gift books, and children's periodicals. Within the pages of these works, abolitionist often relied on--perhaps...
Show moreThis dissertation analyzes antislavery literature between the years 1830 and 1865. Antislavery activists often cast themselves as messengers, responsible for showing the truth about slavery to the American public. The changing print culture allowed abolitionists to spread their message in a way that was previously not possible, in the form of pamphlets, newspapers, novels, poetry, gift books, and children's periodicals. Within the pages of these works, abolitionist often relied on--perhaps appropriated--black authority to lend credence to their assertions, as the testimony from an ex- or escaped slave added a type of evidence unavailable to white abolitionists. Here, though, a problematic dynamic emerges: the use of black identity and authority to fuel claims against slavery's barbarism simultaneously undermines the agency and authority of the very people these works seek to liberate. This project examines the implications of using the already-commodified body of the slave in the fight to end slavery.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9046
Format: Thesis

Title: American Exodus: Challenging Narratives of Exceptionalism in Contemporary American Literature.
Creator: Littler, Lucy R., Patterson, Robert, Montgomery, Maxine, Jones, Maxine, Parrish, Timothy, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation examines how selected contemporary American authors have appropriated and revised elements of the biblical Exodus narrative in order to challenge American Exceptionalism, an ideology itself originally constructed and reified via Exodus rhetoric. Beginning with the seventeenth-century Puritan conception of America as a 'city upon a hill,' ideological descendants of the exceptionalist belief in the predetermined and beneficent nature of American 'progress' have included...
Show moreThis dissertation examines how selected contemporary American authors have appropriated and revised elements of the biblical Exodus narrative in order to challenge American Exceptionalism, an ideology itself originally constructed and reified via Exodus rhetoric. Beginning with the seventeenth-century Puritan conception of America as a 'city upon a hill,' ideological descendants of the exceptionalist belief in the predetermined and beneficent nature of American 'progress' have included Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, and the historical narrative connecting slavery, emancipation, and the civil rights movement. Critics such as Sacvan Bercovitch and Deborah Madsen have usefully explored how communal identities and political agendas conceived through Exodus rhetoric have often produced cultural cohesion via the marginalization of socially constructed racial 'others.' Building on their important work, this project considers how authors have critiqued this framework and its re-appropriation from within these marginalized spaces. I bring together for the first time both black and white authors of the late twentieth century whose revisions of the Exodus narrative problematize the conflation of racial solidarity, individual empowerment, and social progress. Drawing on theoretical models of racial meaning developed by Kimberl' Crenshaw, my intersectionalist approach seeks to complicate the exclusivist and monolithic racial binaries inherent in (re)appropriations of the Exodus paradigm and explore how this exceptionalist framework can actually marginalize an individual from within his or her own perceived racial group. Specifically, in the first and second chapters of this dissertation I argue that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime manipulate the Exodus metaphor in order to destabilize 'whiteness' as the embodiment of radical individualism and the imperialistic acquisition of social power. Similarly, in the third and fourth chapters I contend that Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day revise the Exodus trope in order to interrogate 'blackness' as the monolithic transcendence of suffering and the return to a communal African folk tradition. These texts establish the American 'promised land' of the post-civil rights era as a contested terrain on which racial subjectivities can become both naturalized and commodified in ideological narratives of American 'progress.'
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-7184
Format: Thesis

Title: Testing Free Speech in Our Conflicted Democracy: Julia Hanway and the Wakulla Independent Reporter vs. the Florida Elections Commission.
Creator: Hanway, Julia D., Fenstermaker, John, Stuckey-French, Ned, Moore, Dennis, Program in American and Florida Studies, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis documents and analyzes events ignited by complaints to the Florida Elections Commission (FEC) against the fledgling, independent newspaper, The Wakulla Independent Reporter; its publisher, Julia Hanway; and her business, Florida MicroType Graphics, LLC, in the rural panhandle of Florida. In 2005, the FEC determined that the Wakulla Independent Reporter was an "electioneering communication" under Florida's election laws, and was "not a newspaper," and therefore did not fall under...
Show moreThis thesis documents and analyzes events ignited by complaints to the Florida Elections Commission (FEC) against the fledgling, independent newspaper, The Wakulla Independent Reporter; its publisher, Julia Hanway; and her business, Florida MicroType Graphics, LLC, in the rural panhandle of Florida. In 2005, the FEC determined that the Wakulla Independent Reporter was an "electioneering communication" under Florida's election laws, and was "not a newspaper," and therefore did not fall under the "newspaper" exemption in the "electioneering communication" statute. The FEC's final decision on the validity of the complaints left the paper and its publisher subject to financial penalties and potential criminal prosecution if Ms. Hanway continued to publish without submitting to the FEC's stringent requirements to disclose principals, contributions and expenditures, and to publish a conspicuous disclaimer in every issue. Ms. Hanway and her ACLU-sponsored lawyer, Robert Rivas, filed a lawsuit in federal court against Barbara Linthicum, Executive Director of the FEC, arguing that the Wakulla Independent Reporter was being penalized as a form of viewpoint discrimination, which is prohibited by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In turn, the FEC fought for two years to establish that the publication was an electioneering communication and was not a newspaper. The FEC forced Hanway to incur costs and attorney fees of nearly $80,000 to fight for the right to publish without registering with the FEC. At a pretrial hearing on the eve of trial, the FEC's lawyer suddenly changed its position, insisting that the paper was, in fact, a "newspaper" under Florida law. The newspaper was—contrary to all of its previous arguments—now exempt from the requirements the election law imposed upon electioneering communications. This change in the FEC's position, its lawyers argued, made the lawsuit "moot." They based their argument on the fact that the complaint and investigation were only based on the first issue of the paper—in spite of the fact that the FEC investigation reviewed other subsequent issues of the paper in 2005; and, in spite of the fact that the FEC had determined that the publisher could not print again without registering additional issues. Changing their argument after two years meant that the FEC would not be financially responsible for the Plaintiff's expenses if Judge Hinkle agreed with them. In the summer of 2007, Judge Hinkle ruled that the paper was a newspaper; that the FEC was clearly wrong in their original assessment that it was not a newspaper; and that the FEC should never have tried to force the paper to register as an electioneering communication. In court, he forced the FEC to admit that they would not hinder the publication from printing or force the publisher to register with the FEC in the future. Relieving the FEC from financial responsibility because he did not have to impose an injunction as the plaintiff had requested, Judge Hinkle cited the Eleventh Amendment in his decision. Judge Hinkle wrote that the Eleventh Amendment dictated that he should not overreach in his judgment and create new law without necessity. Instead, he chose to completely avoid the First Amendment aspect of the case and ruled that the case was "moot"—as the FEC had argued in the February hearing. He ruled that, as long as the FEC promised never to take action against the Wakulla Independent Reporter, the case was moot because there was no longer the need for an injunction to protect the paper from the FEC. In 2009, however, the First Amendment was finally addressed as it pertained to the state's electioneering laws. In Broward Coalition v. Browning Florida's electioneering laws were determined to be "overbroad" and were overturned by a court in Orlando. The United States Supreme Court completely reversed earlier decisions that justices had made in the landmark case of McConnell vs. Federal Election Commission. In 2010 the Supreme Court determined that all electioneering communication laws throughout the country were unconstitutional in a case known as Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4278
Format: Thesis

Title: Civilian Involvement in the 1990-91 Gulf War Through the Civil Reserve Air Fleet.
Creator: Imbriani, Charles, Garretson, Peter, Grant, Jonathan, Moore, Dennis, Zanini-Cordi, Irene, Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation is about the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) and its role in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, with a special emphasis on the men and women who manned and operated the civilian aircraft. This is the first time the history of that war has been told from the standpoint of the CRAF and its crew members. Relying heavily on interviews - firsthand accounts - with the crew members who participated, and to primary and secondary sources, the historical context is recreated in which the...
Show moreThis dissertation is about the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) and its role in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, with a special emphasis on the men and women who manned and operated the civilian aircraft. This is the first time the history of that war has been told from the standpoint of the CRAF and its crew members. Relying heavily on interviews - firsthand accounts - with the crew members who participated, and to primary and secondary sources, the historical context is recreated in which the events unfolded. Instead, however, of following the history from the political, diplomatic, and military perspectives, we approach it from the perspective of the nation's civil air carriers and through the words of its civilian crew members. We begin with a description of 'airlift' and the responsibilities of commercial aviation to the nation's defense and security through the National Airlift Policy. The history of commercial aviation and its relationship with the U.S military began just before the outbreak of WW II, and continued through the Berlin Crisis of 1948-49, the Korean War, and the War in Vietnam. That relationship led to the creation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). Activated for the first time in its 38 year history on August 17, 1990, the CRAF played a major role in the Persian Gulf War. Over 5000 CRAF flights operated into the war theater from August of 1990 through May of 1991. The war could not have been won by the United States and its coalition partners - within the timeframe dictated by events - without the active participation of the CRAF. The CRAF could not have fulfilled its commitments to the nation without the voluntary participation of its crew members. The civilian crew members responded overwhelmingly to the nation's call. They served with enthusiasm, commitment, and determination. Over 11,000 civilian crew members participated in those events. Their story is told here for the first time. This dissertation fills a significant historical omission; and adds to the history of America's first major military involvement in the Middle East.
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Date Issued: 2012
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-5368
Format: Thesis

Title: Mary Johnston, Discoverer, and Edith Wharton, Citizen in a Land of Letters.
Creator: Robbins-Sponaas, Rhonna Jean, Moore, Dennis D., Green, Elna C., Rowe, Anne E., Lhamon, W. T., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This text focuses on Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, with special emphasis upon the latter writer. Both Johnston and Wharton were actively writing during the same period, although in different parts of the world. Wharton spent most of her professional career writing from Europe, particularly France, and carried her Old New York heritage with her until she died. With the exception of short periods in New York, Johnston remained close to her childhood home near Warm Springs, Virginia, and...
Show moreThis text focuses on Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, with special emphasis upon the latter writer. Both Johnston and Wharton were actively writing during the same period, although in different parts of the world. Wharton spent most of her professional career writing from Europe, particularly France, and carried her Old New York heritage with her until she died. With the exception of short periods in New York, Johnston remained close to her childhood home near Warm Springs, Virginia, and considered herself very much a Southerner. While they shared a common goal in most of their writings—that of influencing their audience and generating change—their methodology differed radically. In essence, they operated from opposite ends of the writing spectrum. The majority of Wharton's texts fall under what we today classify as literary fiction, but Johnston's writings crossed a number of genres, including but certainly not limited to historical romance, historical adventure, and historical fiction. A large percentage of her writings fall within the scope of sentimentalism and romance literature, genres Wharton typically made a point of avoiding. This text provides a critical discussion of the two women's war writings, an overview of their work, and an in-depth analysis of Edith Wharton's "Writing a War Story" and Mary Johnston's The Wanderers. It considers the two women as they attempted to influence the world around them via their writing, and how their respective identities are reflected in their texts.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1828
Format: Thesis

Title: Louis J. Witte: Hollywood Special Effects Magician.
Creator: Snyder, Joanna Sumners, Fenstermaker, John, Moore, Dennis, Parrish, Timothy, Program in American and Florida Studies, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Louis John Witte is a man whose name is lost to time and whose work is overshadowed by flashier modern-day computerized advancements in movie wizardry. Nevertheless, he remains a cornerstone upon which a thriving scientific discipline has been built. Although he and his creations existed well before the advent of computer technology, he is credited with inventing devices that advanced the art of faking realism by replacing state-of-the-art crude facsimiles and dangerous replications with...
Show moreLouis John Witte is a man whose name is lost to time and whose work is overshadowed by flashier modern-day computerized advancements in movie wizardry. Nevertheless, he remains a cornerstone upon which a thriving scientific discipline has been built. Although he and his creations existed well before the advent of computer technology, he is credited with inventing devices that advanced the art of faking realism by replacing state-of-the-art crude facsimiles and dangerous replications with safer, hyper-realistic models. Witte's inventions erased the boundary separating audiences from the bona fide. His contribution to the science of entertainment coincided with the historic period 1896-1946, in which "movies were the most popular and influential medium of culture in the United States" (Sklar 3). Not only did Witte give his valuable civilian expertise to his country, but he also was a veteran of WWI, when during a "long lonely and dangerous mission," he was wounded (Leavell Appendix II). "Sergeant Louis J. Witte," a telegram written to his mother reads, "was wound [sic] in the Meuse-Argonne operation, on the night of Oct. 2nd., 1918, by an air bomb, and was evacuated to the hospital" (Leavell Appendix II). Witte's service and injury earned him the Purple Heart commendation for his involvement in that battle.
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1653
Format: Thesis

Title: From Longing to Loss: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Novels of Jamaica Kincaid.
Creator: Seanor, Shannon E., Montgomery, Maxine, Moore, Dennis, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Jamaica Kincaid's semi-autobiographical novels give voice to the women of the British West Indies. Through her principal female characters within Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of my Mother, Kincaid explores the long-lasting effects slavery and colonialism have had on the psyche of the West Indian woman. Issues of patriarchy are combined with conflicting cultural perspectives to create heroines who cannot look forward without looking back. For these characters the past is ever...
Show moreJamaica Kincaid's semi-autobiographical novels give voice to the women of the British West Indies. Through her principal female characters within Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of my Mother, Kincaid explores the long-lasting effects slavery and colonialism have had on the psyche of the West Indian woman. Issues of patriarchy are combined with conflicting cultural perspectives to create heroines who cannot look forward without looking back. For these characters the past is ever present, and the struggle for identity is conflated with the struggle to separate themselves from their colonial pasts. The struggle for separation from the colonial past is symbolized by the heroines' struggles with their mothers, whom each woman has difficulty separating herself from. Sigmund Freud, in his quest to document female sexual development, concludes "normal" development occurs once the young female transfers her desire from the mother to the father. However, these strong mother-daughter bonds stem from a pre-verbal fixation on the part of the daughter for the mother that the young woman is unable to grow out of, much less transfer her affections to her father. Within Kincaid's three texts we discover heroines who persevere in their fixations for their mother well into young adulthood, generally lasting until puberty occurs, when these young women relocate their adoration into feelings of hate and betrayal for their mothers. The mothers and mother figures in these three texts are painted as all powerful, all knowing, and all encompassing in terms of their far-reaching impact on their daughters, similar to the deep-penetrating effects of slavery and colonialism on the islands of Dominica and Antigua. Kincaid's works have been analyzed from a psychological feminist point of view before, though the work of Sigmund Freud has never been used in this way to help trace the development of her female characters. It seems Kincaid's heroines present us with an Oedipus complex that has been turned on its head: her heroines express long-lasting desire for their mothers, while their fathers are relegated to the peripheries of their lives and affections. We never see evidence of the transferal of affection from mother to father; rather once puberty begins these women begin to resent the subservient positions of their mothers and find Oedipal replacements for their affections. These works trace the lives of the three heroines through their struggles with and alienation from their mothers, and the subsequent migrations these struggles lead to. Through the course of this paper I will trace the effects these Freudian pre-verbal fixations have had on Kincaid's heroines and their families, and how these relationships serve as metaphors for the greater West Indies and their struggle for freedom and independence from their sordid pasts.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1963
Format: Thesis

Title: "Now I Ain't Sayin' She's a Gold Digger": African American Femininities in Rap Music Lyrics.
Creator: Pemberton, Jennifer M., Martin, Patricia Yancey, Moore, Dennis, Quadagno, Jill, Padavic, Irene, Department of Sociology, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation reports the results of a study about representations of (Black) women, sexuality, and gender relations in rap music lyrics. I explore the extent to which rap music lyrics reproduce or challenge gendered, racialized, and sexual stereotypes of African American women. I ask how men rappers differ from women rappers in depicting (Black) women and themselves. I show what qualities or practices, particularly sexual qualities and practices, are considered as feminine or womanly in...
Show moreThis dissertation reports the results of a study about representations of (Black) women, sexuality, and gender relations in rap music lyrics. I explore the extent to which rap music lyrics reproduce or challenge gendered, racialized, and sexual stereotypes of African American women. I ask how men rappers differ from women rappers in depicting (Black) women and themselves. I show what qualities or practices, particularly sexual qualities and practices, are considered as feminine or womanly in rap music and hip-hop culture and how these qualities and practices are similar to or differ from mainstream gender hegemony. I examine whether and how rap music lyrics construct a hierarchical and complementary relationship between (Black) masculinity and femininity. I ask which feminine meanings and practices are treated as "pariah femininities" and point to features of hegemonic masculinity in hip-hop culture and the broader African American community. Finally, I ask whether and how gendering practices represented in rap music lyrics constitute resistant femininities and challenge White and middle-class gender hegemony. I created a database of rap songs on platinum albums with an original release date of 1984 through 2000. I randomly selected 450 songs from the sampling frame for content analysis. In general, I find that rap music both reproduces and contests prevailing gender, race, class and sexual ideologies and social structures. My analysis of rap lyrics suggests that many male rappers depict (Black) women as promiscuous sexual "freaks" and "bitches" who have sex with men for money and/or other material goods. In many lyrics, they describe their desire for and engagement in sexual activities with freaks and bitches, but they do not express respect. Some women rappers reproduce gendered and racialized stereotypes in their lyrics as well. Still, other women and men rappers challenge these negative images in their songs and offer alternatives. Instead of calling for a reserved or muted sexuality for African American women, a few women rappers depict themselves and other Black women in lyrics as sexually free, in control of their sexuality, and financially independent from men.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2044
Format: Thesis

Title: An Unlikely Cornerstone: The Role of Orchestral Transcription in the Success of the Thomas Orchestra.
Creator: Luongo, Paul Gabriel, Seaton, Douglass, Moore, Dennis, Brewer, Charles E., Jiménez, Alexander, College of Music, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Between 1867 and 1900 Theodore Thomas orchestrated twenty-two pieces for inclusion in his programs. These works were integral to his popularity with American audiences, yet they are among the most overlooked factors contributing to Thomas's unprecedented success touring America throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. They have been overlooked in part because of Thomas's efforts to emphasize the significance of other aspects of his career over these orchestrations. These...
Show moreBetween 1867 and 1900 Theodore Thomas orchestrated twenty-two pieces for inclusion in his programs. These works were integral to his popularity with American audiences, yet they are among the most overlooked factors contributing to Thomas's unprecedented success touring America throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. They have been overlooked in part because of Thomas's efforts to emphasize the significance of other aspects of his career over these orchestrations. These transcriptions were so successful with Thomas's audiences because of the dual purpose they served on his programs. They entertained the populace while validating the concert's high-art status through the names of Europe's most venerable composers. American audiences in the latter half of the nineteenth century were eager to establish their cultural sophistication alongside that of Europe but not at the sacrifice of accessibility in the music that they attended. Through these orchestrations Thomas found a formula by which he could entertain his audiences while nevertheless encouraging their aspiration toward high culture. He was able to understand the needs of American audiences, because in many ways he represented their insecurities, lacking the formal education and life experiences to earn European validation as an orchestral conductor. The similarities in his struggles and those of his public prepared him for his role performing throughout America.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0981
Format: Thesis

Title: On Shaving: Barbershop Violence in American Literature.
Creator: Yadon, Ben, Moore, Dennis, Fenstermaker, John, Parrish, Timothy, Program in American and Florida Studies, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis identifies and examines the trope of barbershop violence in American literature. Drawing on a wide range of literary, scholarly, and historical documents, I explore the way that certain authors subvert traditional ideas about barbershop discourse and use the quintessential American setting as a stage for failed nostalgia, tragic miscommunication, and outbursts of irrational violence in order to craft fictions that call on readers to strive for a more authentic and humanistic...
Show moreThis thesis identifies and examines the trope of barbershop violence in American literature. Drawing on a wide range of literary, scholarly, and historical documents, I explore the way that certain authors subvert traditional ideas about barbershop discourse and use the quintessential American setting as a stage for failed nostalgia, tragic miscommunication, and outbursts of irrational violence in order to craft fictions that call on readers to strive for a more authentic and humanistic identification with their fellow man. In the first chapter I take a close look at Herman Melville's tableau of barbering in the 1855 novella Benito Cereno within a socio-historic context and then trace allusions to this seminal barbering scene in a number of works to show how many authors depict barbershop miscommunication and violence in order to highlight the racial disparities at the heart of American society. In Chapter Two I borrow the sophisticated methodology of James Joyce scholar Cheryl Temple Herr to examine contemporary American novelist Don DeLillo's numerous depictions of the barbershop through the prism of Heideggerian ontology.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1177
Format: Thesis

Title: "At Home We Work Together": Domestic Feminism and Patriarchy in Little Women.
Creator: Wester, Bethany S., Moore, Dennis, Edwards, Leigh, Fenstermaker, John, Program in American and Florida Studies, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: For 136 years, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women has remained a classic in American children's literature. Although Alcott originally wrote the novel as a book for young girls, deeper issues run beneath the surface story of the March family. This thesis explores a few of these issues. Chapter One examines the roles of patriarchy and domesticity in Alcott's private life and in Little Women. Chapter Two emphasizes the Transcendentalist thinking that surrounded Alcott in her childhood, her own,...
Show moreFor 136 years, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women has remained a classic in American children's literature. Although Alcott originally wrote the novel as a book for young girls, deeper issues run beneath the surface story of the March family. This thesis explores a few of these issues. Chapter One examines the roles of patriarchy and domesticity in Alcott's private life and in Little Women. Chapter Two emphasizes the Transcendentalist thinking that surrounded Alcott in her childhood, her own, feminized Transcendentalist philosophy, and how it subsequently infiltrates the novel. Chapter Three explores the role of the struggling female artist in Little Women, as portrayed by the March sisters, especially Jo and Amy March, and how the fictional characters' struggles reflect Alcott's own problems as a female writer in a patriarchal society. Chapter Four discusses Alcott's reformist ideas and the reformist issues that surface in Little Women. Domestic feminism--the idea that a reformed family, in which men and women equally participate in domestic matters, would lead to a reformed society--emerges as the predominant reformist issue in Little Women. Alcott believed that women should be able to choose the course of their adult lives, whether that included marriage, a professional career, or otherwise, without the threat of being ostracized from society. In Little Women, the March family serves as an example of a reformed, egalitarian family in which women exercise self-reliance, employ their non-domestic talents, and still maintain femininity.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1144
Format: Thesis

Title: A Generation of Witnesses: Neo-Testimonial Practices in Flight to Canada, Dessa Rose, Beloved, Kindred, and the Chaneysville Incident.
Creator: Wholuba, Anita P., Montgomery, Maxine L., Jones, Maxine D., Moore, Dennis, Dickson-Carr, Darryl, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes that "fact and fiction have always exerted a reciprocal effect on each other" ("Authenticity" 29). Authors of neo-slave narratives â postmodern renderings of the slave experience â illustrate this reciprocation as they engage in the inventive (re)telling of historical events from the privileged vantage of the present. This study examines the role imagination plays in reconstructing a marginalized, forgotten past. Additionally, this study discerns...
Show moreScholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes that "fact and fiction have always exerted a reciprocal effect on each other" ("Authenticity" 29). Authors of neo-slave narratives â postmodern renderings of the slave experience â illustrate this reciprocation as they engage in the inventive (re)telling of historical events from the privileged vantage of the present. This study examines the role imagination plays in reconstructing a marginalized, forgotten past. Additionally, this study discerns the neo-testimonial patterns â the narrative techniques inspired by the languages, experiences, and memories of the African diaspora â that the neo-slave narrative authors employ as they merge history with imagination in the creation of a fictionalized history. Although critics have already noted the existing relationship between history and fiction in these narratives, how authors finesse the line between history and imagination deserves closer examination. This study looks carefully primarily at Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident. By examining the dynamics of the commingling of history and imagination in these narratives, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of rememory and/or embellishment in the neo-slave narrative (sub)genre.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1069
Format: Thesis

Title: Spinning Pagans or Americans?: Dance and Identity Issues in Stowe, Twain, and James.
Creator: Brown, Meredith Kate, Lhamon, W. T., Moore, Dennis, Faulk, Barry, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Evolution of the American performance culture between 1850-1910 was deeply rooted within broad social and cultural changes. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Henry James engage the reflective quality of performance culture to interrogate these social and cultural changes and to address their place in an increasingly diverse America. In this paper, I discuss the elements of performance culture, specifically dance scenes, which these authors write to draw the readers' attention to American...
Show moreEvolution of the American performance culture between 1850-1910 was deeply rooted within broad social and cultural changes. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Henry James engage the reflective quality of performance culture to interrogate these social and cultural changes and to address their place in an increasingly diverse America. In this paper, I discuss the elements of performance culture, specifically dance scenes, which these authors write to draw the readers' attention to American identity issues. These scenes expose the authors' apprehension and resistance toward changes in the stereotypical American identity. I argue that James is less able to compromise his portrait of the ideal American than Stowe and Twain, which explains his abandonment of the exploration of human consciousness in favor of inanimate objects in his 1907 travel novel, The American Scene.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2963
Format: Thesis

Title: The Affinities and Disparities within: Community and Status of the African American Slave Population at Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
Creator: Kowal, Amy C., Doran, Glen H., Moore, Dennis, Hellweg, Joseph, Keel, Bennie C., Department of Anthropology, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The dissertation investigates how patterns of consumption reflect internal patterns of social hierarchy among the enslaved plantation community and what were the degrees of resistance and accommodation of those enslaved and their structure in relation to white plantation owners. Family, community, customs and practices, religion, and settlement patterns are the factors used to interpret the African American presence at Charles Pinckney's Snee Farm in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina and to...
Show moreThe dissertation investigates how patterns of consumption reflect internal patterns of social hierarchy among the enslaved plantation community and what were the degrees of resistance and accommodation of those enslaved and their structure in relation to white plantation owners. Family, community, customs and practices, religion, and settlement patterns are the factors used to interpret the African American presence at Charles Pinckney's Snee Farm in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina and to perform a regional comparison with similar plantations of the period. This study utilizes ethnological, archaeological, historical, and physical resources to determine status differences within this slave community. Its strength is the use of a holistic and interdisciplinary approach along with the integration of anthropological and archaeological agency and consumer theories. To determine how enslaved Africans defined their community and daily lives utilizing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary method is necessary. Analysis of consumption patterns through archaeological evidence reveals interactions between slaves and other peoples defining the ranges and boundaries of the enslaved community and its elements of resistance. Agency and consumer theories provide an explanation of how individuals possess the ownership of choice and the ability of anthropologists to characterize populations in terms of their own community through the factors deemed most important by the members' own standards in the face of outside pressures. This research provides the ability to compare this community with others in the United States aiding in the development of a theory of modern African American ethnicity formation. Ultimately, this study will contribute to African Diaspora research as more investigations are undertaken with Atlantic populations and large cultural patterns of the African Diaspora are described.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2852
Format: Thesis

Title: Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Changes in American Liberalism.
Creator: Childs, Andrew Geddings, Moore, Dennis, Wood, Susan, Jumonville, Neil, Program in American and Florida Studies, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis explores the relationship of the confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the change away from New Deal liberalism and toward separatism. Through historicizing this issue, I also critiquethe changing nature of professionalism, the push for community control and decentralization of schools, and how these ideas influence democracy in education. Various people involved in the confrontation during the summer and fall of 1968 represent the particular positions of each side of the...
Show moreThis thesis explores the relationship of the confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville and the change away from New Deal liberalism and toward separatism. Through historicizing this issue, I also critiquethe changing nature of professionalism, the push for community control and decentralization of schools, and how these ideas influence democracy in education. Various people involved in the confrontation during the summer and fall of 1968 represent the particular positions of each side of the issue. Further, these two sides are also personified in the AFT (American Federatino of Teachers)and the advocates of community control and decentralization. Through my examination, I attemtp to locate the importance of the experiment in community control in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district under the greater context of American liberalism.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3815
Format: Thesis

Title: Interpreting Unhappy Women in Edith Wharton's Novels.
Creator: Lee, Min-Jung, Moore, Dennis, Koslow, Jennifer, Berry, Ralph, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: There is nothing new under the sun in human experiences of inevitable disappointment, suffering, and pain derived from imperfect human nature and the reality of human life. This dissertation analyzes female characters that suffer from sorrow, pain, and tribulation in these novels by Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence (1920), The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913) and Twilight Sleep (1927). Female characters that I discuss belong to a group of upper-class in New York,...
Show moreThere is nothing new under the sun in human experiences of inevitable disappointment, suffering, and pain derived from imperfect human nature and the reality of human life. This dissertation analyzes female characters that suffer from sorrow, pain, and tribulation in these novels by Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence (1920), The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913) and Twilight Sleep (1927). Female characters that I discuss belong to a group of upper-class in New York, ranged from post-Civil War era to post-World War I. I focus on how they cope with complications and endure unhappiness resulting from their limited positions in society and the inadequacy of their marriages. This dissertation aims to explore the social, cultural, and psychological conditions that lead Wharton's female characters toward a new consciousness and to examine how human psychology develops based on the principles of the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and his followers rather than the approach we associate with Sigmund Freud. As feminist scholars have pointed out, Freud's theory does not hold for girls because boys' and girls' Oedipal complexes are not symmetrical. A girl does not simply transfer her affection from mother to father and give up her tender feelings for her mother. Instead, the bond is more likely to be sustained, and the relation to her father is added to it. Girls often come to define themselves more in relation to others, rather than as separate and isolated. The impact of feminist scholarship since the 1970s has restored Wharton's works to the American canon. Having shifted from the external factors to the psychological domain, Wharton's unhappy female characters represent the oppression of what Jung identifies as the Feminine, not of women. The problem lies in the lack of relationship between a woman's ego and her archetypes—both Feminine and Masculine. This study demonstrates how the character's life is shaped by the suppression and distortion, and later, the implosive and explosive power of her evolving Feminine consciousness. Wharton's characters embody her philosophy that paradox is the essence of living, particularly the paradox in the human psyche. Although one longs for harmony, peace and resolution, experiences teach one that it is conflict and failure that stimulate one's growth and evolution to another stage in life.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3171
Format: Thesis

Title: "How We Got Ovah": Afrocentric Spirituality in Black Arts Movement Women's Poetry.
Creator: Green, Dara Tafakari, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Montgomery, Maxine, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This study, using poetry by Carolyn Rodgers, Sarah Webster Fabio, Sonia Sanchez, Sharon Bourke, Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, examines the manifestations of Afrocentric spirituality in women's writing during the Black Arts Movement. Until recently, there has been a paucity of scholarship on the movement. When studying the BAM, critics have heretofore concentrated on sexism, homophobia, nationalism, and racism as its most prominent aspects. However, BAM writers also have a marked concern...
Show moreThis study, using poetry by Carolyn Rodgers, Sarah Webster Fabio, Sonia Sanchez, Sharon Bourke, Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, examines the manifestations of Afrocentric spirituality in women's writing during the Black Arts Movement. Until recently, there has been a paucity of scholarship on the movement. When studying the BAM, critics have heretofore concentrated on sexism, homophobia, nationalism, and racism as its most prominent aspects. However, BAM writers also have a marked concern with spirituality from an African epistemological standpoint, which brings new possibilities for critical analysis to the forefront. Theorists such as Larry Neal furthermore termed the movement as a spiritual sister to the Black Power Movement. This project contributes to the burgeoning conversation on BAM women's poetry by evaluating the ways in which they deem spirituality as essential for agency as women and as black citizens. I identify three major themes in which women's spirituality serves as a prerequisite for or an enabler of black liberation and revolution. Chapter One explains how Carolyn Rodgers, in her books Songs of a Blackbird and How I Got Ovah, creates personas that initially reject Christianity as a Eurocentric religious construction, but subsequently acknowledge the Afrocentric spirituality of the black church and ascribe to it a revolutionary blackness. Chapter Two demonstrates, through Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf and Sonia Sanchez's I've Been a Woman, that women must first give birth to themselves spiritually before they can successfully accomplish the birth of the black nation. Chapter Three examines five poems by Carolyn Rodgers, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, Sarah Webster Fabio, and Sharon Bourke, arguing that black women poets activate nommo, the power of words to influence action, when they write jazz poetry; as cultural and spiritual leaders in their own rights, they serve as a type of co-priestess to the black community when they recognize the jazz artist as a spiritual priest. Conclusively, I determine that there is indeed space for the recognition of the intended spiritual goals and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement, and especially of marginalized black women's poetry.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4007
Format: Thesis

Title: Four Vietnams: Conflicting Visions of the Indochina Conflict in American Culture.
Creator: Grey, Charles R., Lhamon, William T., Jumonville, Neil, Moore, Dennis, McElrath, Joseph R., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Four Vietnams: Conflicting Versions of the Indochina Conflict from Cold War to the Global War on Terror argues that there is no single historical consensus among Americans on the Vietnam War. There are, instead, four different "Vietnams" in American popular and literary culture: an early Cold War version of Vietnam as an Asian "domino" susceptible of collapsing to Communism and thereby causing its neighbors to collapse successively; a 1960s and early 1970s version of the American enterprise...
Show moreFour Vietnams: Conflicting Versions of the Indochina Conflict from Cold War to the Global War on Terror argues that there is no single historical consensus among Americans on the Vietnam War. There are, instead, four different "Vietnams" in American popular and literary culture: an early Cold War version of Vietnam as an Asian "domino" susceptible of collapsing to Communism and thereby causing its neighbors to collapse successively; a 1960s and early 1970s version of the American enterprise in Vietnam as an imperialist war, an "immoral and criminal" attempt to suppress an indigenous people's will to political and economic independence; a late 1970s version of the war as a "tragedy without villains" for which nobody could really be held morally accountable; and finally, a version of the war as a "noble cause," an altruistic, benevolent attempt to save the Vietnamese people from the horrors of Communism. Four Vietnams attempts to demonstrate that each of these four "versions" take shape at successive stages in American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as responses to particular historical conditions and circumstances, and I also argue that each of the four interpretive schemas is grounded in a particular ideology, be it Eisenhower-era anticommunist liberalism, the leftist critique of imperialism and capitalism, post-Vietnam Carter liberalism, or post-Vietnam Reagan conservatism. The dissertation also examines the relationships between a series of texts (novels, films, nonfiction books, popular songs) in which the Vietnam War or some aspect of the war is a central feature and the formation of these "versions" and the reigning discourse on the war. Lastly, I attempt to show how discourse on the Global War on Terrorism often reads American involvement in the Middle East today through the same interpretive schemes that have been applied to Vietnam and how Vietnam is often invoked in radically different ways by warring ideological camps in the current debate as an analogy to the current military and political situation both abroad and within the United States itself.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3964
Format: Thesis

Title: A Literary Archaeology of Loss: The Politics of Mourning in African American Literature.
Creator: Henry, Kajsa K., Dickson-Carr, Darryl, Moore, Dennis, Ashford, Tomeiko, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Richard Wright's The Long Dream (1958), James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990) attempt to expose the mental and physical scars of trauma through an excavation of memorable, historical events that resonate with issues of loss. The focus of this study is on the intersection of the mourning of these losses and the use of writing to represent them for the purposes of recovery and healing for the African...
Show moreRichard Wright's The Long Dream (1958), James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990) attempt to expose the mental and physical scars of trauma through an excavation of memorable, historical events that resonate with issues of loss. The focus of this study is on the intersection of the mourning of these losses and the use of writing to represent them for the purposes of recovery and healing for the African American community. As close textual analyses of these texts show, by writing about loss and exploring the ramifications of loss within their narratives, these writers expose a critical dimension of African American literature that confronts the overwhelming presence of death, performing a literary archaeology of the physical and symbolic losses that these events represent. By placing narrative forms, oral and written, which are politically and aesthetically able to recover, commemorate, and "funeralize" actual and symbolic loss, these authors suggest a connection between rituals of mourning, functions of writing, and the modes of witnessing and testifying. In the introduction, I build a theory of textual mourning by considering theories of mourning, memory, trauma, and African American literature studies. In chapter one, I explore the language of loss that powers Beloved and Philadelphia Fire by examining how collective and individual trauma complicates the functions of mourning cultural trauma. In chapter two, I examine two literary considerations of the Emmett Till murder, Blues for Mister Charlie and The Long Dream to understand again how the language of loss influences Wright and Baldwin's narrative strategies in their attempts to confront the sexualized cultural trauma of lynching. Textual mourning continues the functions of mourning by making writing a way to funeralize the dead, present ways of remembrance, and transform loss into politicized literary forms. In the conclusion, I briefly explore the new avenues of inquiry that textual mourning allows in our understanding of how writing, loss, mourning, and melancholia intersect to develop a new language for discussing trauma.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4113
Format: Thesis

Title: Darker Matters: Racial Theorizing through Alternate History, Transhistorical Black Bodies, and Towards a Literature of Black Mecha in the Science Fiction Novels of Steven Barnes.
Creator: Brickler, Alexander Dumas J., McGregory, Jerrilyn, Poey, Delia, Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, Ward, Candace, Moore, Dennis D., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences...
Show moreBrickler, Alexander Dumas J., McGregory, Jerrilyn, Poey, Delia, Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, Ward, Candace, Moore, Dennis D., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: This dissertation seeks to provide a critical investigation of several novels written by African American science- and speculative fiction author, Steven Barnes. In exploring Lion's Blood (2002), Blood Brothers (1996), the Aubry Knight trilogy (1983, 1989, 1993), and Iron Shadows (1998), the project posits that there is substantive work being done in depicting the Black embodied somatic as a site of allegorical historicizing. Herein, I read the novels' work with subgenres of alternate history...
Show moreThis dissertation seeks to provide a critical investigation of several novels written by African American science- and speculative fiction author, Steven Barnes. In exploring Lion's Blood (2002), Blood Brothers (1996), the Aubry Knight trilogy (1983, 1989, 1993), and Iron Shadows (1998), the project posits that there is substantive work being done in depicting the Black embodied somatic as a site of allegorical historicizing. Herein, I read the novels' work with subgenres of alternate history, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, and fantastical AfroAsia (respectively) as serving as a means by which Barnes's constructions of gendered Blackness can meaningfully be read as a kind of Afrofuturist engagement with both the Afrodiasporic past and globalized dimensions of the yet-to-come.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Sp_Brickler_fsu_0071E_14496
Format: Thesis

Title: The Few, the Proud: Gender and the Marine Corps Body.
Creator: Patterson, Sarah Elizabeth, Sinke, Suzanne M., Moore, Dennis, Piehler, G. Kurt, Upchurch, Charles, Koslow, Jennifer Lisa, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences,...
Show morePatterson, Sarah Elizabeth, Sinke, Suzanne M., Moore, Dennis, Piehler, G. Kurt, Upchurch, Charles, Koslow, Jennifer Lisa, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
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Abstract/Description: This project examines the changing shape of femininity and masculinity for Marines from World War I to the Korean War, focusing on the ways that the body serves as a canvas for demonstrating the negotiation of gender roles and the Marine Corps image. Gender has been a constant issue for the military. However, few historical studies consider the ways that the Marine Corps’ status as a particularly elite, masculine institution impacted the desired image of femininity for its female recruits and...
Show moreThis project examines the changing shape of femininity and masculinity for Marines from World War I to the Korean War, focusing on the ways that the body serves as a canvas for demonstrating the negotiation of gender roles and the Marine Corps image. Gender has been a constant issue for the military. However, few historical studies consider the ways that the Marine Corps’ status as a particularly elite, masculine institution impacted the desired image of femininity for its female recruits and how this image changed over time. The hyper-masculine nature of the military influenced the relationship between masculinity and femininity for both servicemen and women. My project looks at these changes in masculinity and femininity by placing gender identity within the context of the hyper-masculine military environment. R.W. Connell’s Masculinities, Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood, and Aaron Belkin’s Bring Me Men assist in putting gender identity in the military into a more complex and nuanced context, especially focusing on masculinity’s centrality to the American military institution. Belkin, in particular, argues that military masculinity has never been entirely devoid of feminine elements. Aspects of femininity have long been a part of military life, from domestic responsibilities often associated with women to close same sex companionship between soldiers. While generally considered less masculine when taken as separate behaviors, they did not seem problematic in a military context. This leads to the conclusion that the incorporation of women into the military was not a radical introduction of femininity into a solely masculine environment, but rather a more complicated shift in the relationship between gender and occupation. This project’s conclusions support this kind of closer relationship between masculinity and femininity in the military context. Francine D’Amico and Laurie Weinstein’s Gender Camouflage, Melissa Ming Foynes, Jillian C. Shipherd, and Ellen F. Harrington’s “Race and Gender Discrimination in the Marines,” Melissa S. Herbert’s Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat, Heather J. Höpfl’s “Becoming a (Virile) Member: Women and the Military Body,” Leisa D. Meyer’s Creating GI Jane, and Sara L. Zeigler and Gregory G. Gunderson’s Moving Beyond GI Jane address this shift in gender relations and the resulting tension between military men and women throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries I investigate changes in military gender identity by looking at legislation and regulations controlling gender and sexuality in the military, media depictions of Marines, and the ways that gendered military identity plays out on the body, especially through physical fitness, uniforms, and bodily maintenance. The Marine Corps documented their ideas of normative masculine and feminine Marine bodies through pictures, propaganda, and newsletters. Examination of these different characteristics of the ideal body allow for comparison through time of the ways that Marines presented themselves to society, as well as the methods the Corps utilized to encourage images advantageous to its purposes. Such comparisons show changes in the perception of gender identity through time, as well as new norms of appearance and behavior that developed. This evidence illustrates the complicated and often contradictory relationship between masculinity and femininity that all Marines, male and female, negotiate. This project illustrates the significance of these frequently gendered representations of Marine bodies through time. They show the negotiation of gender within the Corps and how assumptions of gender roles shifted from one war to the next. Understanding these changes helps explain the tensions and conflicts which developed between male and female Marines during different periods, as well as creating a framework for investigating these tensions into the contemporary era. The primary sources used for this project focus on the appearance of Marines, male and female, and include national legislation related to Marines and military regulations enforcing conformity in dress and appearance. Memoirs of Marines, publications intended for Marine readers, as well as publications depicting Marines aid in gaining a better idea of the function of gender for Marines, especially in relation to their interactions between male and female Marines. These documents show the changes occurring in expectations about femininity and masculinity in the Marine Corps over time. Public publications, such as general interest magazines, women’s magazines, and newspapers, showed public ideas of Marines’ gender and their relationship to civilian American gender ideals. This project explores the changing shape of normative Marine Corps bodies and the impact of ideas of masculinity and femininity in their deployment as methods of supporting the services’ goals.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: 2019_Spring_Patterson_fsu_0071E_14978
Format: Thesis

Title: Revenge of the Asian Woman.
Creator: Chan, Dorothy Ka-Ying, Kirby, David, Hamby, Barbara, Jolles, Adam, Moore, Dennis, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: “Who doesn’t think kissing is the greatest thing / in the world other than eating?” Revenge of the Asian Woman comes to life on a sexed-up soap opera / B-movie platter where passion and food and fantasy reign supreme: excess in the form of full odes and triple sonnets with towers of macarons and carnival desserts and Hong Kong street food on a skewer—and make it a double. The East Asian girl boss takes her revenge on those who have fetishized her, looking great in gold booty shorts, because ...
Show more“Who doesn’t think kissing is the greatest thing / in the world other than eating?” Revenge of the Asian Woman comes to life on a sexed-up soap opera / B-movie platter where passion and food and fantasy reign supreme: excess in the form of full odes and triple sonnets with towers of macarons and carnival desserts and Hong Kong street food on a skewer—and make it a double. The East Asian girl boss takes her revenge on those who have fetishized her, looking great in gold booty shorts, because “If I played roller derby, my name would be Yellow Fever, / knocking out all those white boys from college / who used to whisper sweet nothings to me // in Mandarin.” She narrates her parents’ love story, the Chinese-American immigrant dream, her Eastern zodiac fate, and her own sexual awakening. Revenge comes to life with scenes that mimic the movies: the speaker’s father as a young boy in Hong Kong running into a circus tent, winning a rice eating contest; young lovers in LA at 3 in the morning; and a forehead that is “too Godzilla, too Tarzan / too Wonder Woman”—scenes of a Chinese-American experience, one in which the female speaker is “ready for takeoff,” while paying homage to her heritage: a grandmother who wants to buy her all the jade and gold in the world, a younger cousin who thinks she’s had a hundred boyfriends, and a grandfather who watches soap operas with her. Revenge of the Asian Woman is really about “it,” whether that “it” is the It girl, the It trend, or the ineffable feeling you have in “LA, 3 AM, the wind in your hair, down to your / breasts, braless under a low-v dress, / stroking the driver who’s your lover.” This collection presents plenty of longing for those fleeting moments, regardless if those moments are the speaker’s first sexual awakening, “Ode to the First Boy Who Made Me Feel It”; the mother recounting her favorite childhood show about a family trying to reunite in “Triple Sonnet for Autoerotica”; or the nostalgia that’s presented with references to '80s teen films starring Andrew McCarthy, Liberace’s reign of Las Vegas, or “an appliance / that would deliver food from any part of the world—any part of the universe” from The Jetsons. And with all this sex and food and longing, Revenge of the Asian Woman is above all, a fun romp. Let’s have a little Liberace-Las-Vegas-fun along the way with the glitz and glamour and kitsch of Japanese love hotels, B-movie starring Asian girls traveling to Mars, and total fantasy fulfillment as our dreams and nightmares come to life. The Asian woman conquers all, having her cake and eating it too— “Oh, cut that cake again.”
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: 2019_Spring_Chan_fsu_0071E_14985
Format: Thesis

Title: Demagogue: The Revolutionary Birth of an American Literary Figure.
Creator: Reed, Wayne M., Kilgore, John Mac, Frank, Andrew, Mariano, Trinyan, Moore, Dennis D., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This dissertation asks new questions about the figure of the demagogue as cultural production. How did the concept of the demagogue emerge and manifest itself in the public imagination during the American Revolution and what relationship does it have to revolution? Who was using this term and to what end? What cultural materials, both physical and discursive, go into the making of the demagogue as a figure of political literature? What factors make the character not only intelligible and...
Show moreThis dissertation asks new questions about the figure of the demagogue as cultural production. How did the concept of the demagogue emerge and manifest itself in the public imagination during the American Revolution and what relationship does it have to revolution? Who was using this term and to what end? What cultural materials, both physical and discursive, go into the making of the demagogue as a figure of political literature? What factors make the character not only intelligible and applicable in a modern political era when the people are considered the source of all legitimate authority? I argue that elites during the American Revolution struggled to make sense of the popular movements of the 1760s, and they used the figure of the demagogue as an aesthetic expression, a way of coming to terms with the realities of a popular political revolution. Over the course of the revolution and afterwards in the run-up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the figure of the demagogue became a rhetorical device that elites used to intervene on public opinion of convince audiences of the dangers posed by democratic political relationships. More importantly, the demagogue registers a fundamental contradiction of modern political reality. In an era of popular sovereignty, when the people are considered the source of authority, those who aspire to power must both lead and be led by the people. The idea that the people have authority over their leaders is in contradiction with the idea that leaders have authority over the people. This is a foundational contradiction of modern political relationships that animates political movements as much as it animates the imagination. That the demagogue re-emerged in the popular imagination is a direct result of this contradiction.
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Date Issued: 2019
Identifier: 2019_Summer_Reed_fsu_0071E_15375
Format: Thesis

Title: The History of Living Forever a Novel.
Creator: Wolff, Jacob, Winegardner, Mark, Kalbian, Aline H., Moore, Dennis D., Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Crucet, Jennine Capó, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences,...
Show moreWolff, Jacob, Winegardner, Mark, Kalbian, Aline H., Moore, Dennis D., Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Crucet, Jennine Capó, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: The History of Living Forever tells the story of Conrad, a gay teenager with a dying father and a secret lover: his high school chemistry teacher, Samuel "Sammy" Tampari. When Sammy commits suicide in the novel's first chapter, Conrad inherits a lifetime's worth of journals that chronicle the teacher's complicated history with alternative medicine. Conrad must then decide whether and how to use these journals to save his father. Much of the book comprises Conrad's exploration of his teacher's...
Show moreThe History of Living Forever tells the story of Conrad, a gay teenager with a dying father and a secret lover: his high school chemistry teacher, Samuel "Sammy" Tampari. When Sammy commits suicide in the novel's first chapter, Conrad inherits a lifetime's worth of journals that chronicle the teacher's complicated history with alternative medicine. Conrad must then decide whether and how to use these journals to save his father. Much of the book comprises Conrad's exploration of his teacher's journals, which relay Sammy's travels across the globe in search of alternative medicines and inspiration--travels that take him to China, to Belize, and even to Easter Island. Along the way, Sammy acquires allies and enemies who may ultimately influence the fate of his young student. For Conrad, the novel, at its heart, takes the shape of a simple coming-of-age story. Conrad must learn to accept and negotiate with his outsider status as a science prodigy, as a gay teen, and as the only Jew in his small Maine town. And yet this central shape of the story becomes complicated by its surroundings--epic tales involving the history of medicine and the search for eternal life.
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Date Issued: 2015
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9494
Format: Thesis

Title: "Let Us Try to Make Each Other Happy, and Not Wretched": the Creek-Georgian Frontier, 1776-1796.
Creator: Kokomoor, Kevin, Frank, Andrew K., Moore, Dennis, Herrera, Robinson, Gray, Edward G., Davis, Frederick, Department of History, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "Let us try to make each other happy" tracks a Creek-Georgia frontier as it emerged in the American Revolution and lasted to the turn of the nineteenth century. There multiple groups of Creeks, Americans, and Europeans grappled with ideas of sovereignty and the right of self-determination. The Creek-Georgian frontier, however, embraces conceptualizations of frontiers as places where misunderstanding bred distrust, fear, localized violence, and eventually, racial hatred, challenging older...
Show more"Let us try to make each other happy" tracks a Creek-Georgia frontier as it emerged in the American Revolution and lasted to the turn of the nineteenth century. There multiple groups of Creeks, Americans, and Europeans grappled with ideas of sovereignty and the right of self-determination. The Creek-Georgian frontier, however, embraces conceptualizations of frontiers as places where misunderstanding bred distrust, fear, localized violence, and eventually, racial hatred, challenging older definitions of frontiers as places of accommodation or mutual understanding. Multiple groups faced each other, and what they created was a place of terrible brutality where extremism, not compromise, was the natural way of things."Let us try to make each other happy" blends a New Indian History approach with recent interpretations of frontiers as areas of empire and nation-building. Italso carefully outlines how Creek decisions ordered Georgian lives on the backcountry, and embraces the importance of community-level identity in the study of Early American history. Ultimately, I utilize Creek, Georgian, and European threads to weave a twenty-year narrative of misunderstanding and violence that, as I argue, had tremendous bearing on the development of the southeast.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8707
Format: Thesis

Title: Labor and Leisure in the Tropical Environment: Race, Class, and the Enjoyment of Nature.
Creator: Bowman, Robert, Edwards, Leigh H., Outka, Paul, Davis, Frederick R., Moore, Dennis D., Roberts, Diane, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: There is no shortage of encomiums to Florida's natural environment. Many writers have conventionally depicted it as a tropical paradise, a latter-day Eden in which leisure awaits the fortunate visitor. Building on this conventional attitude that aestheticizes Florida's nature, my dissertation argues that writers have repeatedly racialized and classed the tropical environment of Florida by using the frequently competing activities of labor and leisure. As an advocate for the development of...
Show moreThere is no shortage of encomiums to Florida's natural environment. Many writers have conventionally depicted it as a tropical paradise, a latter-day Eden in which leisure awaits the fortunate visitor. Building on this conventional attitude that aestheticizes Florida's nature, my dissertation argues that writers have repeatedly racialized and classed the tropical environment of Florida by using the frequently competing activities of labor and leisure. As an advocate for the development of Florida tourism, Harriet Beecher Stowe naturalizes black labor, using it as a foil to the white appreciation of natural beauty. Broadening the view of labor, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings romanticizes the rural work of poor whites while continuing to privilege the leisurely observation of nature as a superior behavior that allows for the philosophical and aesthetic contemplation of the natural environment. In contrast to these two writers, Zora Neale Hurston offers a more thorough and thoughtful treatment of African-American labor, seeing its cultural value as well as its relationship to an exploitative labor system. In the epilogue, I use Carl Hiaasen's work to discuss the way in which contemporary Florida theme parks intensify these romanticized attitudes toward labor, leisure, and nature.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8738
Format: Thesis

Title: Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination.
Creator: Jacobson Jordan, Tatia, Moore, Dennis, Epstein, Andrew, Fenstermaker, John, Ward, Candace, Poey, Delia, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination follows the life and literary presence of the legendary figure, Marie Laveau. This female spiritualist lived in antebellum Louisiana from 1801-1881. After her death, her legend has continued to grow as evidenced by her presence in contemporary print and pop culture and the tens of thousands of visitors to her grave in New Orleans every year. Here, I contextualize Laveau in a pre-Civil war America by looking at the...
Show moreFashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination follows the life and literary presence of the legendary figure, Marie Laveau. This female spiritualist lived in antebellum Louisiana from 1801-1881. After her death, her legend has continued to grow as evidenced by her presence in contemporary print and pop culture and the tens of thousands of visitors to her grave in New Orleans every year. Here, I contextualize Laveau in a pre-Civil war America by looking at the African American female in print and visual culture. I trace the beginnings of several tropes in literature that ultimately affect the relevancy of the Laveau figure as she appears and reappears in literature beginning with Zora Neale Hurston's inclusion of Laveau in Mules and Men. I offer close readings of the appearance of these tropes in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, interrogate her connection to Caribbean lore in Tell My Horse, and show the evolution of this figure in several of Hurston's short stories. I then offer close readings of the refiguring of Laveau in Robert Tallant's works, Ishmael Reed's novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Jewell Parker Rhodes's Marie Laveau trilogy. I intervene with contemporary scholarship by suggesting that novels like Corregidora by Gayl Jones, Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, and The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara draw not on a general conjure figure, as previously thought, but instead implicitly refashion feminist heroines that resemble Marie Laveau, characters with a circum-Atlantic consciousness that arise from Hurston's literary legacy.
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3685
Format: Thesis

Title: Moliére in Denmark, Then and Now.
Creator: Leysieffer, Annelise, Cloonan, William J., Moore, Dennis D., Hargreaves, Alec G., Pietralunga, Mark F., Dahl, Mary Karen, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida...
Show moreLeysieffer, Annelise, Cloonan, William J., Moore, Dennis D., Hargreaves, Alec G., Pietralunga, Mark F., Dahl, Mary Karen, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University
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Abstract/Description: The aim of this dissertation is to examine the role of Molière in Danish theatre. More specifically, this dissertation identifies the extent to which Danish productions are faithful to the original French plays and discusses factors that have contributed to the success or failure of such productions in recent years. Factors relevant to this analysis include cross-cultural contrasts and similarities between France and Denmark, the themes of the individual plays and their transformations when...
Show moreThe aim of this dissertation is to examine the role of Molière in Danish theatre. More specifically, this dissertation identifies the extent to which Danish productions are faithful to the original French plays and discusses factors that have contributed to the success or failure of such productions in recent years. Factors relevant to this analysis include cross-cultural contrasts and similarities between France and Denmark, the themes of the individual plays and their transformations when translated into Danish, the quality of translations and adaptations and the use of modern or traditional dress. Included are comparisons of Danish translations of Molière from the seventeenth century to present-day productions. Methodologically, I proceed by examining the above-mentioned factors in relation to six plays: L'Avare, Tartuffe, L'École des femmes, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Les Fourberies de Scapin and Le Misanthrope. In each case, I compare the original text with Danish translations and adaptations and draw on interviews with Danish directors, scenographers, other theatre practitioners, scholars, translators and journalists. The extensive interviews combined with research in theatre archives and national libraries, were conducted in order to analyze the ways in which Molière has been adapted for and received by the Danish public. After interviewing the above-mentioned people, after examining a vast number of manuscripts and newspaper reviews and conducting extensive research in Danish archives and libraries, I have documented and thus established that Molière has had a crucial and lasting effect upon the development of Danish theatre ever since the early eighteenth century. After researching the various productions, I have identified the extent to which Danish theatre professionals remain faithful to the original plays including aspects such as theme, language and costumes. From this research, it is clear that Molière has had a tremendous impact on and remains a cornerstone in contemporary Danish theatre.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3084
Format: Thesis

Title: Survival of Turkish Neutrality: The Role of U.S. Aid to Turkey in WWII.
Creator: Gungor, Hakan, Garretson, Peter P., Hanley, Will, Moore, Dennis D., Piehler, G. Kurt, Liebeskind, Claudia, Grant, Jonathan A., Florida State University, College of Arts and...
Show moreGungor, Hakan, Garretson, Peter P., Hanley, Will, Moore, Dennis D., Piehler, G. Kurt, Liebeskind, Claudia, Grant, Jonathan A., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
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Abstract/Description: The United States' financial, diplomatic, and friendly relations with the Turkish government significantly contributed to the survival of Turkish Neutrality when faced with the Axis and Allies threat during the Second World War. The economic crisis in Turkey and the Axis and Allied Powers' pressure to join World War II put the survival of Turkish neutrality at stake. While the United States' support was invaluable to the Turkish neutrality, the Allies as well as the Jews benefitted...
Show moreThe United States' financial, diplomatic, and friendly relations with the Turkish government significantly contributed to the survival of Turkish Neutrality when faced with the Axis and Allies threat during the Second World War. The economic crisis in Turkey and the Axis and Allied Powers' pressure to join World War II put the survival of Turkish neutrality at stake. While the United States' support was invaluable to the Turkish neutrality, the Allies as well as the Jews benefitted geographically, militarily, and strategically from Turkish non-belligerency. The United States recognized that the Turkish neutrality and its military mobilization in wartime served the Allies' cause, especially during the dark days when Turkey stood between the Germans and the strategically vital oil resources and communication of routes of the Middle East. These mutual contributions have been largely overlooked in the historiography of the Second World War, as well as the scholarly works on Turkish-U.S. relations. Most often, historians associate Turkish-American relations with the Cold War, but they have overlooked active American-Turkish relations in WWII. Such relations are evident in the archival and printed primary sources. Tracing the contributions of the United States through Lend-Lease Act and international conferences, it became evident that the United States contribution was very important to the Turks to maintain their non-belligerency. However, it is also evident that the Turkish government greatly contributed to the Final Victory by containing the German aggression. Furthermore, it was the very essence of this neutral policy that enabled the Turks to rescue thousands of Jews from the Nazi Germany.
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Date Issued: 2016
Identifier: FSU_2016SP_Gungor_fsu_0071E_13123
Format: Thesis

Title: "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Master-Slave Relationship in Black Women's Neo-Slave Narratives.
Creator: Price, Jodi L., Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, Jones, Maxine Deloris, Moore, Dennis D., Ward, Candace, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: A growing impulse in American black female fiction is the reclamation of black female sexuality due to slavery's proliferation of sexual stereotypes about black women. Because of slave law's silencing of rape culture, issues of consent, will, and agency become problematized in a larger dilemma surrounding black humanity and the repression of black female sexuality. Since the enslaved female was always assumed to be willing, because she is legally unable to give consent or resist, locating...
Show moreA growing impulse in American black female fiction is the reclamation of black female sexuality due to slavery's proliferation of sexual stereotypes about black women. Because of slave law's silencing of rape culture, issues of consent, will, and agency become problematized in a larger dilemma surrounding black humanity and the repression of black female sexuality. Since the enslaved female was always assumed to be willing, because she is legally unable to give consent or resist, locating black female desire within the confines of slavery becomes largely impossible. Yet, contemporary re-imaginings of desire in this context becomes an important point of departure for re-membering contemporary black female subjectivity. "What's Love Got to Do With It?" is an alternative look at master-slave relationships, particularly those between white men and black women, featured in contemporary slave narratives by black women writers. Although black feminist critics have long considered love an unavailable, if not, unthinkable construct within the context of interracial relationships during slavery, this project locates this unexpected emotion within four neo-slave narratives. Finding moments of love and desire from, both, slaveholders and slaves, this study nuances monolithic historical players we are usually quick to adjudicate. Drawing on black feminist criticism, history, and critical race theory, this study outlines the importance of exhuming these historic relationships from silence, acknowledging the legacies they left for heterosexual love and race relations, and exploring what lessons we can take away from them today. Recognizing the ongoing tension between remembering and forgetting and the inherent value in both, this study bridges the gap by delineating the importance of perspective and the stories we choose to tell. Rather than being forever haunted by traumatic memories of the past and proliferating stories of violence and abuse, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Octavia Butler, Gayle Jones, and Gloria Naylor's novels reveal that there are ways to negotiate the past, use what you need, and come to a more holistic place where love is available.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_2017SP_Price_fsu_0071E_13737
Format: Thesis

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